Month: April 2006

puppy play dates

Since we’ve gotten our puppy son my wife and I ahve become quite the budding dog enthusiasts. We’ve been taking him to the dog park in fremont as often as possible; and as concerned parents we’ve been paying close attention to everything. One thing that we’ve noticed is that puppies have friends and BEST friends. Our puppy ESPECIALLY likes to play with Dancer, and Sinbad to name just two. This got me thinking (as things usually do) about how to give back to the doggy community AND make life better for myself. I got around to coming up with an idea for a web service

You create profiles for your pets, participate in discussions, and actively keep a schedule of your dog plans. This allows you to check up and see when your puppies favorite pals will be at the park next and meet up with them.

Of course that wouldnt be the limit of what you could do, or how it could strengthen the community. Assuming that if I build it they will come. And if it were made universal enough (and I have enough experience with large scale web apps to make it so) it could be made to, without any special work, be usable by any group of enthusiasts in any area of the country (world)

Could be big. I’ll chew on the thought some more.

Cheers

Bad router, BAD!

So, in noticing general trends, I seem to have uncovered an (in retrospect) obvious link between cheap routers, port forwards, and network disconnects.

It seems that, on a cheap router, if you have X port forwards you are increasingly likely to have random disconnects and such (especially with wifi) as X increases…

so if your internet throughput is crappy. you’re experiencing ertratic ping times, and getting lots of crappy disconnects… try removing all your port forwards… seems to9 really work. My best guess is that theres just not enough cpu/ram to maintain the tcp stream states.

Playing with loopholes

The most amusing things happen when you’re been coding a long time. I found, and used a “hole” in one of our database routines (which has since been fixed)

getOneValueFromTable($srcTable, $srcField, $whereField, $whereValue);
produces SQL like “SELECT $srcField FROM $srcTable WHERE $whereField = ‘$whereValue'”. Can you spot the potential problems in something like this? Consider this: getOneValkueFromTable($srcTable, $srcField, ‘1’, ‘1’; delete from $srcTable; ”);

Granted its not much of a problem if only proper developers are able to use this function, but if any untrusted party were able to affect any of those variables… big problems…

Everyone should know this. If you didnt know this kind of a problem existed… consider yourself warned. This has been a public service announcement. We now return you to the normal silence found on this blog

😉

cheers
DK

Out of town.

Like scott mentioned I’ve been grinding like a madman on Ookles. It’s been a long stretch of solid work but we’re coming near a real product. Dont get me wrong, theres still a lot of work to be done, but we’ve got something to work on now. It’s one thing to be putting together a skeleton on which to hang your features and it’s another thing altogether to be sculpting the flesh.

So I’m spending time with the wife and the parents, out of town. I’m posting this from a living room with 4 people, 7 dogs, and 1 12″ iBook.

The Human Condition

I’m constantly amazed by the power of the human condition. How our spirit and drive push us towards excellence. And how, under the most adverse conditions, we find in ourselves with the drive to change our very reality into something better. When we’re down and out we find that we’re wise, intelligent, powerful, cunning, thorough, enlightened, and immortal.

But when we overcome our dire circumstances we seem to loose our drive. We loose our cutting edge. And we find in ourselves only the desire to do as much of nothing as possible anymore.

It’s almost as though we, as a species, have a need to exist in a state of turmoil. And it’s as though we cannot be at our best unless it’s in the circumstances of also being at our worst.

We cannot see good without evil. We cannot see the contrast. It seems that also we cannot create good without evil. We get comfortable, and we allow our weeds to grow in our lawns, once the skies are sunny.

I wish that we as a people did not require the worst to be the best. It’s an interesting thought. It’s cynical, and likely untrue on some levels and true on others. Perhaps tomorrow I’ll see the idea in a different light. Or perhaps tomorrow I’ll decide to think on more pleasant ideas.

Anyhow.
G’night